I run a MacBook Pro 17" early 2008... Core2 Duo CPU with a 7200RPM
Seagate HDD but the primary and secondary SATA controllers are held back
to 1.5 and 1.0 Gb/s respectively from 3.0 Gb/s on later models. The
stock system is OK but not great for development so I supercharged it :-)
About a month ago I found out that I could theoretically get 6GB of RAM
in this thing (Apple still only supports 4GB) and I picked up a stick of
4GB (adding it to my 2GB) of RAM from Other World Computing and it
REALLY makes a difference. Running w/ Eclipse, GlassFish, MySQL (not so
hungry), Firefox and it really helps not to have to swap anymore. I
wouldn't run a dev box with anything less than 6GB today.
The 2nd major performance improvement is getting a SSD. True -
compilation is CPU intensive not disk intensive - but starting up Apps
almost instantaneously (in comparison to an HDD) is something to behold.
Firefox pops open. Eclipse launches in around 5 seconds. The system
launches so fast. But you do need to get a TOP end SSD in my opinion -
preferably SLC over MLC though the new rave is eMLC - and although
prices are coming down I wanted to get one of the best SLC SSD's I could
find so I picked up an Intel X-25E 64GB (I know you said cheap and at
$800 you could pick up another laptop but reliability is huge for me). I
then swapped out my HDD for the SSD and then picked up an Optibay
replacement for my DVD drive and put my HDD in the DVD drive bay; i.e.
SSD is primary drive; HDD is secondary; and DVD drive ends up in a DVD
enclosure (came with the kit). One needs a DVD less and less these days
so getting an SSD and an HDD in a system is ideal IMHO.
The system CPU and SATA controllers are now my bottle neck but when I
upgrade to a newer Mac the SSD is going into the next system and CPU
will be better :-) Personally I like to get at least 2 if not 3 years
out of any given laptop.
Bottom line:
----------------
- 6GB+ memory
- Great SSD
- Decent CPU
and you'll be rocking
--Nikolaos
gshegosh wrote:
W dniu 07.01.2011 18:11, Richard Hauswald pisze:
Backup on a daily basis(!). I promise you: If you ever developed
webapps on a SSD you will never develop using a HDD again. If you have
to switch back... ...it will be hard!
Yep, I'm using RAID 0 for my system partition and I'm not complaining,
too. Substantially cheaper than getting top of the line SSD (tried some
cheaper ones and they were worse than HDDs) and performance is on par.
Any Dual Core CPU should suite your needs, I never ever ran out CPU
power when developing software. Memory is something you can't get
enough of. 4GB is ok but I'd like to have 6GB, cause Firefox, Eclipse,
Tomcat, Windows 7, Windowx XP Mode and a Linux VM running in parallel
is not so uncommon for a developer. But nearly to much for 4GB RAM.
Damn, perhaps I should be asking about _software_ stack, not hardware
one. Eclipse and Tomcat seem to be better for a PC than Netbeans and
Glassfish are.
As I'm writing these words, Netbeans and Glassfish running for some 3 or
4 hours take 2,5GB of my memory and it grows with each redeploy, max
I've seen was almost 8GB. "killall -9 java" became a kind of routine for
me since NB+GF will become unstable well before the take up those 12GBs
I have.
I guess memory is not a problem these days, since it's cheap and easy to
get 8GB or more even in a laptop.
Perhaps one can't run "out" of CPU, but when I compare compilation time
of the same project on my machine which is 4-5s to my friend's Mac where
it's about 20-30s, I believe my productivity _can_ hurt because of a
slow CPU. Especially on my old laptop which compiles the same project in
3 minutes. And compilation is not all, frequent redeployments, switching
between IDE and browser and Photoshop and Virtualbox, using Firebug, all
this is much more acceptable on a fast, multi-core CPU.
That's why I'm asking about i5 and i7 laptops -- I can read benchmarks
all day, but I'd love to hear what development on these machines feels
like, especially from folks who use Netbeans and Glassfish combo.
The only other option is to find a shop that will let me play with a
laptop for an hour before I buy it :-D
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--
Nikolaos Giannopoulos
Director of Information Technology
BrightMinds Software Inc.
e. nikol...@brightminds.org
w. www.brightminds.org
t. 1.613.822.1700
c. 1.613.797.0036
f. 1.613.822.1915
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gaining the trust of online customers is vital for the success of any company
that requires sensitive data to be transmitted over the Web. Learn how to
best implement a security strategy that keeps consumers' information secure
and instills the confidence they need to proceed with transactions.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/oracle-sfdevnl
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